Guy Opperman MP very kindly invited me to a booze-up in the Houses of Parliament last week. It was not the sort of night one might associate with the Piers Gaveston Society, in fact I ended up retreating to a pub around the corner for a couple of pints to water down the House of Commons red, which had left me pining for my Rennies.
Getting into Parliament is a bit like boarding on a budget airline, although airline staff smile a lot more. I do not know what is going on between the Met Police and our MPs, but there does not seem to be much love around that place. Plebgate, I suspect, was the tip of the iceberg.
Opperman, the MP for Hexham racecourse, told the audience that anyone with racing’s best interests at heart should not be complacent. If racing wanted the betting-right legislation to be a runner, ensuring a fair return on, among other things, oversees profits from UK racing, we all needed to start badgering our MPs. Which, in my case, is the Prime Minister.
I imagine that our local carol service will be my best opportunity to chew Dave’s ear and this is how I imagine the conversation might go.
'Wasn’t Once in Royal David’s City beautiful, Prime Minister? I do love that descant bit. Although, if you ask me, I think the organist might have had a few at lunchtime. By the way – and I’m not one to tell tales – but can you explain to me why the Under Secretary of State for Sport is so ambivalent about racing and the jobs it provides.’
'Who?’
'Tracey Crouch. The one that’s football crazy. Which is all well and good, we all like a kickabout, but racing is the second-largest sport in Britain in respect of revenues, employment and attendances. But she doesn’t give a monkey’s. Just not interested’
'I thought it was Helen Grant.’
'No, no. You got rid of her. Which was a great shame. She was just getting her head around the whole thing and then wham. Reshuffled.’
'Yes. It was beautifully sung, wasn’t it. Oh look, there’s the vicar.’
And with that, he will be off scoffing mince pies to avoid me telling him about the 12,000 jobs that Steve Harman, the head of the British Horseracing Authority says are about to go down the plug hole if John Whittingdale, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, gets his pants pulled down by the bookmakers when deliberating the Levy deal.
Harman also told the parliamentary gathering that he met his first girlfriend at Hexham racecourse on a non-race day, which I thought was a nice touch. Although I missed the rest of what he had to say by mulling over the circumstances of that liaison.
Unsurprisingly, the former chief executive of William Hill, Ralph Topping, who is believed to still represent the heart and mind of William Hill, stuck the knife [again] into racing recently when bragging that “it [racing] is not an attractive proposition to brands it wants to associate with”.
He continued: “There is no Hermes, there is no Prada, there are none of the expensive clothing brands, no luxury goods that you associate with other sports. It was not long ago that a sponsor couldn’t be found for the Derby. I think racing needs to bear that in mind.”
So, not really representative of the spirit of cooperation which politicians constantly say they are looking for. No, this was a man gleefully, and gratuitously, stamping on the head of a golden goose whose eggs have got smaller because it is not being fed.
Topping was playing the school-ground bully. He was threatening racing and saying, 'We are bigger and tougher than you, and you have no friends. So do not upset us by asking for a cut of our offshore scam or we’ll give you a kicking’.
And, just in case the message had not got through, he also made it personal. “Nick Rust [CEO of the BHA] has a habit of blinking first,” he snarled, as he eyeballed other bookmakers and told them to spend their sponsorship money on other sports. Then, he bizarrely assured the world that the bookmakers were tough people. As if we needed reminding of their past. So, Whittingdale, you have been warned.
0 nhận xét:
Đăng nhận xét